With competition brewing on all sides, it is important to engage your customers by giving them a positive restaurant experience while offering them perks that show you care about them. After all, you are 50% more likely to sell to a repeat customer than a new one. In a study done in the US by the National Restaurant Association, 57% of adult consumers are more likely to visit restaurants that offer loyalty programs. We feel that metric is probably quite close to the Indian scenario. Doesn’t it make sense to emphasise nurturing our relationship with our existing customers over acquiring new ones?

There is always a potential pool of customers, but how would you target the ones that would remain loyal to you?

Identify and engage

According to statistics, chances of a customer being loyal to your restaurant increases by 80% if they return for a third visit. With consumer sentiment shifting constantly, it becomes all the more necessary to make sure their experience is authentic and personalised which will, in turn, increase your chances of gaining loyal customers.

A simple text message has proven to be useful in driving customer traffic to restaurants. An SMS doesn’t just limit itself to fancy discount coupons, but is an effective medium in forming a communication between your diners and your restaurants. Customers are over four times more likely to open an SMS than an email, making it the top choice for customer service.

Plus, research shows that 91% of people keep their mobiles closeby throughout the day, and most of them read their text messages.

The success of your restaurant, thus, lies in identification, engagement and customer retention. A more personalised experience, based on understanding of the basic customer needs and imbibing your restaurant with attributes for customer satisfaction will convert your satisfied customers into devoted ones.

Incentives and reward programs

Did you know loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase?

If you truly want to build a loyal customer base, offering perks and incentivesto your diners is one way of keeping them happy.

One good example of this practice is the airline and hotel industry, who reward points to their frequent customers which later translates into some kind of discount, gift card and other special treatments.That’s why passengers prefer flying a particular airline or staying at a hotel offering them the maximum points.The much popular coffee chain, Starbucks, in addition to their reward program, engages the customers to use their app to place order, pay and even access streamed music. With earning stars being a part of the Starbucks loyalty reward program, customers can later redeem these stars as rewards like free coffee.

Gain loyal customers with a problem-solving approach

Who isn’t looking for a loyal customer? With technology, you can reach out to them in ways that weren’t possible before. A usual discount offer has no charm anymore and customers expect a specifically crafted and personalized plan. Personal gestures in the form of birthday and anniversary cards and wishes, or personalised gift cards on special occasions, can delight them and improve the probability that they will come back. Restaurants everywhere need to engage in this practice as 80% of your future revenue will come from 20% of your existing customers.

Divide and delight

Smart and targeted communication is another key approach that helps in creating opportunities and experiences for the customers.

Segregate your customer base depending upon their needs and use. There are always a bunch of spenders, looking for quality service, then there are the loyalists, who’d love you for your brand value and would stay loyal, no matter what. The ones who do not like burning a hole in their pocket and are big on savings would hunt you for your amazing deals. Strategize to make sure you have something to offer to each category.

inResto Loyalty

This service that caters to all of these segments of your customers and gives you the option to appreciate each of them based on their preferences and behaviour. The loyalty program has three avenues:

Visit based: Offers that include a free starter or a beer after 3 regular visit to the restaurant.

Expenditure based: Earn 1 point for every Rs.100 spent and redeem all collected points at a later stage as discounts, gift cards or coupons.

Punch Card Based: A coffee on the house after you have bought 4 of them.

Conclusion

Dining, over the years, has turned into a personalized experience, thus making customers an integral and crucial part of the restaurant business. It can cost 5x more to acquire new customers than to keep current ones, so retargeting campaigns and loyalty programs are essential in a robust, cost-effective growth plan. This makes inResto Loyalty an essential tool that can help you nurture stronger relationships with your customers, thereby helping you build consistency and confidence, delighting them at every turn. Plus, the controls are in your hands. You take the calls. Want to find out more about the product? Click here.

http://inresto.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/CM.jpg375512inrestobloghttp://websites.inresto.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/inrestoblog-1.pnginrestoblog2017-09-19 12:13:092018-01-03 17:49:16Through Thick And Thin: How to Nurture Customer Loyalty That Lasts

When a customer dines at a café or a restaurant, food is just half of the story. It’s the overall experience that counts, including the way diners are treated by your staff.

According to a recent study, 73% of diners prefer more personalized experiences, even if that means a brand uses their personal data. During the busiest hours, collecting information, managing it, and personalizing the user-experience can be difficult. With inResto Feedback, you can now get access to an all-in-one platform that can be used to give your customers a valuable and memorable dining experience.

It is essential for any restaurant to get honest customer feedback to improve its overall service. inResto feedback takes the customer’s particulars and intelligently tracks the data points to build reports in the inResto Dashboard. These reports are then used to segment your audience and create a database. It also sends reminders to your visitors and creates personalized wishes and customized offers. In a nutshell, it helps you monitor every aspect of your restaurant from the diner’s perspective so you can optimize its performance and take preemptive steps to fix recurring issues.

Of course, understanding your customer’s perception of the taste and texture of the food, and their suggestions to help you improve the dishes you serve, and add to the restaurant’s menu, is invaluable. After all, one must consider constructive feedback from their diners, rather than working on uncertain assumptions.

Another important thing to keep a track of is food quality in real time. If a recipe goes horribly wrong, it needs to be addressed immediately before it spreads across social media. On inResto, as soon as a bad review gets entered in the food section, not only will the customer be given more options to get the details of what went wrong, but you will also get an alert so you can go to their table and remedy the situation with an offer of a free meal, a complimentary dessert, or whatever else you choose, before the news spreads to their social circles.

Feedback for Staff Performance

The ratings for each staff member in accordance with how they treated the customers, gives an idea of the staff’s performance. This leads to a better analysis of the staff performance and gives you reliable data to assist in your hiring and training decisions. You could even design reward platforms to recognize and/or incentivize your staff based on their ratings.

Feedback to fix issues as they happen

The immediate grievance redressal system lets you approach the customer at your restaurant as soon as they give a rating of 2 or less on any of the questions on the feedback form. When this happens, you are immediately alerted, so you have an opportunity to discuss the matter with the diners and try and improve their experience then and there.

This information extracted from the feedback can be used in a constructive manner to build loyalty programs and campaign ideas to recognize, re-engage and connect with your customers.

Conclusion

You have spent a fortune on building and developing your dream of a restaurant. So why take a chance on guessing what your diners think when you can track everything easily with technology. Get inResto for your restaurant and manage every aspect without a hassle. Especially with inResto Feedback, cold, hard data can make your customers’ dining experiences feel more warm and caring.

In theF&B industry, outstanding service is sublime, but it is exceptional efficiency at the end of the day that paves the way for success. Enter inResto, a unique restaurant management platform that makes use of technology to create end-to-end solutions for restaurateurs. It is the only open platform that successfully connects with various services across the food-tech ecosystem thereby providing holistic solutions for guest management goals of restaurants. With the advent of new restaurants opening every other day, and the competition among restaurants becoming more cutthroat than ever, inResto gives your restaurant that extra edge. Here’s why every restaurant needs to be well versed with this restaurant technology management platform.

1. Because you’d rather have your customers make lines inside the bar than outside the restaurant door

inResto helps your host or hostess manage all your reservations from one simple interface. Whether the reservation comes in from your website, Facebook, from reservation platforms like Dineout, or even over the phone, they are all funnelled into inResto Reserve, where diners can be assigned tables or put on the waiting list, all from the app. This, in turn, dramatically reduces unorganized waiting lines, dissatisfied customers, and unaccounted leads.

2. Because feedback that counts needs a more dependable channel than arbitrary sheets of paper

Every critique, every word of appreciation and every opinion of your customer goes a long way to eventually fostering a fulfilling relationship with them. Often, the entire customer data is recorded using pen and paper, which usually gets lost. The feedback system via inResto on the other hand, is progressive, intelligent and intuitive. For instance, if the diner rates an aspect of their experience 3 stars or lower, it immediately shows more questions to get more details. Not only does this greatly enhance your diner’s experience, but also is a great tool to assess the performance of your servers and the departments of your restaurant.

3. Because your table inventory needs to be reinvented

inResto brings you data driven analytics that not only configures your floor and section layouts but also monitors real-time status of tables. This helps you in planning the seating to accommodate more customers, reduces the tables’ turnaround time and maximizes your seating inventory. Thus, at the end of the day you are able to utilize and manage your tables to their optimal capacity; efficiently and effectively seating more customers, thereby increasing revenues.

4. Because we strive to maximise your gains

We believe that the strongest customer experiences come from the simplest of steps. All the data collected from various platforms comes together at the inResto Dashboard that makes use of various tools and features which aids in generating more profits. The campaign management tool is one such offering that not only engages but also re-engages and retargets your customers. This makes your overall restaurant management an economically more efficient venture as re-engaging a customer for a transaction costs three times lesser than acquiring new customers.

5. Because we understand that businesses run on relationships

There is power in the concept of personalization and inResto recognises that. It provides to you an insight-based loyalty programme that helps you identify your loyal customers and rewards them for keeping them engaged with your restaurant. It also employs strong customer communication through emails and SMSes that help keep your patrons in the loop. Here, you can easily set up a customizable programme where diners can get a free beer, desserts, points for their visits or expenditure, and much more.

Summing up, consider the following scenario – delectable cuisine, ambience that provides a sense of exclusivity and services, simply on point. The customers are in love with everything you provide yet may hesitate in coming to you again.

inResto figures out the whys and the whats so that you can concentrate on providing your clientele with the experience of a lifetime, and have them coming back for more.